Rock.

A Voice Of Action

Patti Smith's Renewed Declaration Of Independence

April 09, 2000|By Greg Kot, Tribune Rock Critic.

AUSTIN, Texas — "You are all important! You all mean something! Your collective voice can make a difference!"

Patti Smith isn't running for president, though on this cold St. Patrick's Day evening she is agitating like a rock 'n' roll politician. She raises a fist to the stars with a guitar strapped around her neck and a crowd of thousands sprawled out before her, at a concert just a few hundred yards from the Texas state Capitol building.

Smith is the mother of two children, a widow and a poet. She is also the first riot grrrl, a rocker who streaked her punk iconoclasm with hippie idealism and post-feminist politics. She has always viewed rock as the ideal forum to uplift, enlighten and agitate, yet she's never climbed into the machine that creates and cannibalizes rock stars. Over eight albums spanning 25 years, she's preferred to work the margins of an industry perpetually in love with less complicated personalities.

For a brief time, in 1978, she was at the center of the pre-MTV swirl, presenting a bold new vision of rock femininity and finding herself swept onto the pop charts for the only time by "Because the Night," co-written with Bruce Springsteen. Within two years, Smith disappeared from the music-making mill to start a family in Detroit with former MC5 guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith--a stunning anti-career move by a then-32-year-old performer at the top of her game.

"All I knew how to say at that point in my life had been said," Smith now says simply.

Two decades later, Smith finds herself on the outside again, knocking on the door of a culture much too preoccupied with 'N Sync and the latest doings of Puffy, Britney and the Backstreet Boys to bother with a 53-year-old woman whose sexuality was always more feral than cosmetic and whose last hit was more than 20 years ago. But after the deaths of her husband and brother, as well as close friend Robert Mapplethorpe, the time was right. She spent two albums pulling herself out of mourning, with "Gone Again" (1996) and "Peace and Noise" (1997). Now, with "Gung Ho" (Arista), Smith has regained her swagger. Her great theme is self-empowerment, and in a pop landscape bereft of big ideas and righteous voices, she stands taller and more necessary than ever.

Greeting a visitor at her hotel suite door, she still dresses the part of the boho rabblerouser who seized the New York underground by its throat in the early '70s: jeans drooping out of scuffed black boots, graying hair falling around her shoulders, flushed cheeks and blue-gray eyes unaccented by makeup, a black jacket bearing a ribbon that was a gift from presidential candidate Bill Bradley. She raves about Chicago, the place of her birth and the site of one of her greatest performances, in 1998 at the Riviera. "That," she says, "was an unbelievable night."

Q--That show is certainly the only time I've ever seen the Declaration of Independence read with guitar feedback. What prompted that?

A--Ever since I was a little kid I was fascinated with the Declaration of Independence, this beautiful document on parchment paper. But I don't think I fully comprehended what rights it gives me as an American. So I finally picked up a book devoted to it in San Francisco and read it on the 18-hour flight to Australia. A few days later, I was watching a documentary on Ho Chi Minh's early years, and his involvement in the fight for Vietnamese independence. Ho Chi Minh had done a serious amount of study of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence, and he used this knowledge when he structured the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence. I thought it was time for me as an American citizen to know as much about our Declaration of Independence and how we developed our freedom and constitution as Ho Chi Minh did. The song "Gung Ho" came out of that experience.

Q--You're saying "Awake, people, arise" and "Lift up your voice" on this album. You're not hearing too many rock artists say that these days.

A--We're not hearing these kinds of things talked about much at all except occasionally by a politician like Bill Bradley or Jesse Jackson. We're pretty complacent right now as a people. The economy is going good, we're not at war, people are not being drafted. Even things like the AIDS epidemic don't seem as scary as they did a decade ago. But our children are murdering each other. The gun situation in America is way out of control. We're polarizing racially. The moral fabric of the country is unraveling. But everyone thinks we're doing fine because we've got credit cards and computers. People see what I'm talking about as "'60s stuff." But I look at it as a continual necessity. We have to constantly remind ourselves of the value of the individual, and the strength of our collective voice. Those views should never be looked upon as old-fashioned.